The Devil's Teardrop (42 page)

“You armed?” Lukas called.

“Service,” Ted called. “Both of us.”

Meaning their Glocks or Sig-Sauer service pistols. Lukas thought about her MP-5 machine gun, sitting in her truck at the moment. She would have given anything for the weapon but didn’t have time to get it now.

She studied the corridor, which was still empty.

Eight doors in the hallway. Five on the right, three on the left.

He’s behind one of them.

Here’s a puzzle for you, Parker. Which door leads to our Judas?

Three hawks have been killing a farmer’s chickens. . . .

Holding the gun out in front of her, she eased forward, saw the silhouettes of the other agents at the far end of the corridor. Using hand signals, she motioned them aside, back around the corner. If Hardy burst from a doorway she’d have trouble acquiring a target with Ted and Nance in the background. They’d have the same trouble too and might hesitate to light up Hardy for fear of hitting her. Alone, she’d lose the cross-fire advantage but could shoot freely if he tried to make a run for it.

Lukas moved down the corridor.

Which door? she wondered.

Think . . . Come on! Think!

If Hardy had any sense of orientation he’d know that the five offices on her right were exterior ones; he wouldn’t’ve picked any on the left because he’d risk getting trapped inside the building.

Okay, we’ll narrow it down to those on the right.

Of these five, two were labeled reception—the euphemism for the interrogation rooms like the one in which they’d met with Czisman. Hardy might logically doubt that the FBI would have reception rooms and he might figure that they had something to do with security and would have no access to outside—which in fact they didn’t; they were windowless.

The door in the middle was labeled maintenance. Lukas didn’t know exactly where that one led but she supposed it was a janitor’s closet with no other exit and
concluded that Hardy would have made the same deduction.

That left two doors. Both unmarked and both, she happened to know, leading to small offices for temporary word-processor operators. Both rooms had windows facing the street. One was the office closest to the reception area. The other was closest to Ted and Nance.

But what’s the hurry? she asked herself. Just wait for backup.

Yet Hardy could be trying to break out one of the windows right now, close to escaping. Lukas wouldn’t risk that this man might get away.

Which door, which one?

She made her choice: The door nearest the lobby. It made sense. Hardy wouldn’t have run thirty or forty feet down the corridor with an armed agent behind him before taking cover.

Once she made her decision she forgot all other options.

Puzzles are always easy when you know the answer. Just like life, right?

She tried the knob. But the door was locked.

Were they always locked? she wondered. Or had he locked it from the inside?

No,
he’d
locked it. He
had
to be in there. Where else could he have gone? She ran to the guard station, got the keys from Artie’s belt, returned. She slipped the key in the hole as quietly as she could.

Turned the latch.

It clicked with an alarming sound.

Hell. May as well just shout out, Here I come!

One, two . . .

Breathe deep.

She thought about her husband, about her son.

I love you mommy!

And pushed through the door fast.

Crouching, weapon up, pressure on the sharp trigger of the Glock . . .

Nothing . . .

He wasn’t here.

Wait . . . the desk . . . It was the only piece of furniture he could be hiding behind.

She stepped around it, swinging her weapon in front of her.

Nothing.

Hell, she’d gotten it wrong. He’d gone through the other door, the far one.

Then, from the corner of her eye, faint motion.

The door directly across the hallway from this one—another door marked maintenance—had opened slightly. The muzzle of a silenced gun was lowering toward her.

“Margaret!” Susan Nance’s voice came from the end of the corridor. Then the woman shouted, “Freeze, you!”

Lukas flung herself to the floor as Hardy’s gun fired twice.

But he wasn’t aiming at her. The bullets were meant for the plate-glass window. The glass shattered into a thousand pieces.

Nance fired a group of three as Hardy, who ran awkwardly because of a large knapsack on his back, stumbled through the corridor and into the office where Lukas crouched. The agent’s shots missed. He fired blindly in Lukas’s direction, forcing her under cover. She rolled to the floor. The slugs clanged into the desk and Hardy leapt through the empty window frame onto the deck
overlooking Ninth Street. He jumped over the fence to street level. Lukas returned fire but she missed too.

She climbed to her feet and ran to the window.

Lukas understood what had happened: Hardy had tried the door on the window side of the building and found it locked. He’d waited in a janitor’s closet across the hall, outguessing her—figuring she’d probably pick the door she did and get the key to open it. He’d used her.

She’d been dead wrong.

He aims at the hawk on the left and shoots and kills it. . . .

Standing on the crisp broken glass on the deck, she looked up and down the street but could see no sign of Hardy.

The bullet doesn’t ricochet.
 . . .

All she saw was a huge crowd of people returning from the fireworks, staring in surprise at the shattered window that framed the attractive blonde with a gun in her hand.

How many hawks are left on the roof?
. . .

Parker and Cage
were in the document lab once more. Joined this time by the dep director.

“Six dead,” the director muttered. “Lord almighty. Inside headquarters.”

Dr. John Evans, shot twice in the face, had been found in a seventh-floor closet. Artie the guard was badly wounded but would live.

“Who the hell
is
he?” the director demanded.

The man pretending to be Hardy had left some good fingerprints and they were being run through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System files right now. If his prints were on file anywhere in the country they’d know his identity soon.

Lukas pushed through the door. Parker was alarmed to see a peppering of blood on her cheek.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Artie’s,” she said in a low murmur, noticing his eyes on the blood. “Not mine.” She looked at Parker then Cage for a moment. The stones in her eyes were gone
but he couldn’t tell what had replaced them. “How did you know?”

Cage glanced toward Parker. “It was him figured it out.”

“Tremble,” Parker answered. He held out the sheet of paper that he’d found in his pocket when he’d been looking for baby-sitter money. “I noticed there was tremble in his handwriting. That’s what happens when somebody tries to disguise their writing. I remembered it was Hardy who’d written down what I dictated but why would he try to fake his writing? There was only one reason—because
he’d
written the extortion note. I checked the lowercase
i
in ‘two miles’ and the dot was a devil’s teardrop. That confirmed it.”

“What happened?” the deputy director asked. “The director wants to know. Immediately.”

“It was all a setup,” Parker said, pacing. Somewhere in his mind the entire plot was quickly falling into place in minute detail. He asked Lukas, “How did Hardy get involved in the case?”

“I
knew
him,” she said. “He’s been coming by the field office for the past few months. Just flashed a badge and said he needed some stats on felonies in the District for a congressional report. District P.D.’s Research and Statistics does it a couple times a year. It’s all public information—not ongoing investigations—so nobody bothered to check. Today he showed up and said he’s been assigned as liaison for the case.”

“And it’s one of those obscure departments,” Parker pointed out. “So that if the mayor or the police chief really
did
send somebody from Major Crimes or Investigation over here for liaison he probably wouldn’t have known there was no Len Hardy.”

Lukas said, “So he’s been planning this for two months.” Sighing in disgust.

“Probably six,” Parker muttered. “Planned every detail. He
was
a goddamn perfectionist. His shoes, his nails, his clothes . . . Flawless.”

Cage asked, “But the guy in the morgue, the one we thought was the unsub. Who’s he?”

Parker said, “A runner. Somebody Hardy—or whatever his name is—hired to deliver the letter.”

“But,” Cage said, “he was killed in an accident.”

“No, it wasn’t an accident,” Lukas said, stealing the words from Parker’s throat.

Nodding, he said, “Hardy murdered him, ran him down in a stolen truck to make it look accidental.”

Lukas continued, “So we’d think the perp was dead and bring the money back to the evidence room. He knew we’d have tracking devices in the bags. Or that we’d try to collar him at the drop.”

Cage, wincing again from the cracked rib, said, “He left the transmit bags downstairs. Repacked the money. And ripped off the tracking labels too.”

“But he came up with the info about the Digger, didn’t he?” the deputy director asked. “Because of him we stopped the shooter before he could do any real damage on the Mall.”

“Well, of
course,
” Parker responded, surprised they didn’t get it.

“What do you mean?” the dep director asked.

“That’s why he
picked
the Vietnam Memorial. It’s not far from here. He knew we’d be shorthanded and that we’d virtually empty the building to get everybody out, looking for the Digger.”

“So he could just waltz into Evidence and pick up the
money,” Lukas said bitterly. “It’s just what Evans said. That he had everything planned out. I told him that we’d rigged the bags with tracers but Evans said he had some plan to counter that.”

Cage asked Parker, “The prints on the note?”

“Hardy never touched it without gloves but he made sure the runner did—so we could verify the body was the unsub’s.”

“And he picked sombody with no record and no military service,” Lukas added, “so we couldn’t trace the runner. . . .
Jesus,
he thought of everything.”

A computer beeped. Cage leaned forward and read. “It’s an AFIS report and VICAP and Connecticut State Police files. Here we go . . .” He scrolled through the information. A picture came up on the screen. It was Hardy. “His real name is Edward Fielding, last known address, Blakesly, Connecticut, outside of Hartford. Oh, our friend is not a very nice man. Four arrests, one conviction. Juvie time too but those records’re sealed. Treated repeatedly for antisocial behavior. Was an aide and orderly at Hartford State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He left after a nurse he was accused of sexually harassing was found stabbed to death.

“The hospital administration,” Cage continued, reading from the screen, “thinks Fielding talked a patient, David Hughes, into killing her. Hughes was admitted two years ago. Christmas Day. He had severe brain damage following a gunshot wound and was highly suggestible. Fielding probably helped Hughes escape. The Hospital Board and the police were going to investigate Fielding but he disappeared after that. That was in October of last year.”

“Hughes is the Digger,” Parker announced softly.

“You think?”

“Positive.” He continued, “And the Hartford newspaper shooting—what got Czisman started on Fielding’s trail—that was in November.” Recalling the clipping in Czisman’s book. “That was their first crime.”

A Chronicle of Sorrow . . .

“But why so much death?” the dep director asked. “It can’t just be for the money. He must’ve had some terrorist leanings.”

“Nope,” Parker said definitively. “Not terrorism at all. But you’re absolutely right. It has nothing to do with the money. Oh, I recognize him.”

“You
know
Fielding?”

“No, I mean I recognize the type. He’s like a document forger.”

“Forger?” asked Lukas.

“Serious forgers see themselves as artists, not thieves. They don’t really care about the money. The point is to create a forgery that fools everyone. That’s their only goal: a perfect forgery.”

Lukas nodded. “So the other crimes—in Hartford and Boston and Philly—they were just exercises. Stealing one watch, a few thousand dollars. It was just to perfect his technique.”

“Exactly. And this was the culmination. This time he got a big chunk of money and’s going to retire.”

“Why do you think that?” Cage asked.

But Lukas knew the answer to that one too. “Because he sacrificed his errand boy so he could escape. He told us where the Digger was.”

Recalling how Hardy had fired at the bus, Parker added, “He may actually have been the one who shot the Digger on the Mall. If they took him alive he might have talked.”

“Hardy was laughing at us,” Cage said, slamming his fist down on the table. “The whole fucking time he was sitting right next to us and laughing.”

“But where is he?” the dep director asked.

Parker said, “Oh, he’ll have his escape all planned out. He’s outthought us every step of the way. He won’t stumble now.”

“We can get his picture off the video camera down in the lobby,” Cage said. “Get it to all the TV stations.”

“At two in the morning?” Parker said. “Who’s going to be watching? And we’ve already missed the newspaper deadlines. Anyway, he’ll be out of the country by sunup and on a plastic surgeon’s operating table in two days.”

“The airports’re closed,” the dep director pointed out. “He can’t get any flights till morning.”

“He’ll be driving to Louisville or Atlanta or New York,” Lukas said. “But we’ll put out a bulletin to the field offices. Get agents to all the airports, Amtrak stations and bus terminals. Rental-car companies too. Check DMV and deeds offices for an address. And call Connecticut State Police.” She paused, looking at Parker. He could see that she was thinking exactly what he was.